Rishi Sunak appears to miss the prison hulks of 1776-1857.
April 6, 2023 6:07 AM Subscribe
Coming back next: public hangings.
(The Tories are unaccountably less keen on reviving debtor's prisons, though.)
posted by cstross at 6:46 AM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
(The Tories are unaccountably less keen on reviving debtor's prisons, though.)
posted by cstross at 6:46 AM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
I would like to see a journalist ask him, if it's really so comfortable and such good value, whether he can tow one up the Thames and moor it next to Parliament for his MPs to live on. That would free up a whole bunch of housing, and save taxpayer money as they won't need us to pay for their second homes in London any more.
But there's no pushback any more, is there. They just assert these things and nobody challenges them.
posted by automatronic at 7:04 AM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
But there's no pushback any more, is there. They just assert these things and nobody challenges them.
posted by automatronic at 7:04 AM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]
Building a bridge to the 19th century.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:20 AM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:20 AM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
But there's no pushback any more, is there. They just assert these things and nobody challenges them
Well, there is a difference between challenges and meaningful challenges. Catch-22, in its most primal form, says "they can do anything that we can't stop them from doing."
There is enough anger in the air to stop completely grievous abuses from simply sailing through -- Suella Braverman isn't PM yet -- but not enough to keep them from continuing to propose them, or to stand at podiums labeled "STOP THE BOATS," or to sound more like the 1970s National Front with each passing week.
And that is because, much as it is in America and many other places, the conservative party's road to electoral success is to appeal to a specific ethno-cultural demographic and to demonize other populations that that demographic loathes.
posted by delfin at 7:50 AM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
Well, there is a difference between challenges and meaningful challenges. Catch-22, in its most primal form, says "they can do anything that we can't stop them from doing."
There is enough anger in the air to stop completely grievous abuses from simply sailing through -- Suella Braverman isn't PM yet -- but not enough to keep them from continuing to propose them, or to stand at podiums labeled "STOP THE BOATS," or to sound more like the 1970s National Front with each passing week.
And that is because, much as it is in America and many other places, the conservative party's road to electoral success is to appeal to a specific ethno-cultural demographic and to demonize other populations that that demographic loathes.
posted by delfin at 7:50 AM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
Author (and MeFi's own) Charlie Stross has predicted the return of the Bloody Code and he is not far off the mark, it would seem.
posted by aeshnid at 7:56 AM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by aeshnid at 7:56 AM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
But there's no pushback any more, is there. They just assert these things and nobody challenges them
The Tories got sick of being questioned by the BBC, so they took it over. Now the only critical news source is the Guardian. (And papers like The National in Scotland, but no one outside of Scotland read that and the Tories will never win more than 8 of the 60 seats in Scotland, so they don't care. (And that's assuming that the current scandal actually damages the SNP in the long run.))
I remember the BBC coming in with really incisive and hard questions. Which they still use. On Labour MPs, trans kids, union leaders, etc. They then throw softball questions to the Tories and theEDL BNP ERG.
posted by Hactar at 8:01 AM on April 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
The Tories got sick of being questioned by the BBC, so they took it over. Now the only critical news source is the Guardian. (And papers like The National in Scotland, but no one outside of Scotland read that and the Tories will never win more than 8 of the 60 seats in Scotland, so they don't care. (And that's assuming that the current scandal actually damages the SNP in the long run.))
I remember the BBC coming in with really incisive and hard questions. Which they still use. On Labour MPs, trans kids, union leaders, etc. They then throw softball questions to the Tories and the
posted by Hactar at 8:01 AM on April 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
Fuck Rishi Sunak and fuck the Tories.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:06 AM on April 6, 2023 [14 favorites]
posted by ellieBOA at 8:06 AM on April 6, 2023 [14 favorites]
The current backlog of asylum cases is 166,261, so it's not as if putting 500 asylum seekers on a barge is going to make any appreciable difference to the numbers. This isn't about solving the problem, it's simply about generating headlines like 'Sunak cracks down on migrants' (and even that isn't working: the Daily Mail is now stirring up outrage about the proposal to house asylum seekers on what it calls a 'luxury' barge). At least the government hasn't (yet) revived the 2020 plan to put asylum seekers on disused oil rigs.
posted by verstegan at 8:35 AM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by verstegan at 8:35 AM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]
There is a book from the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, that is a valuable resource in this context. I say 'valuable' not to suggest that the book is well-written, insightful or pleasant, because it is a noxious load of racism, conspiracy theory and xenophobic claptrap; rather, that the hard-right in many nations seem to be treating it as a documentary whose events are happening in real-time.
In it (to summarize quickly), a human tsunami of Southeast Asian migrants seeks entry into Europe on a massive fleet of journeyman ships. The migrants are depicted in dehumanizing, animalistic and violent manners, and once the lines of resistance (political and border military) fail to restrain them, they sweep over first France and soon the entire Western world via force of numbers, outbreeding the locals, taking over governments, allying with far-left and anarchist groups and violent outbursts.
There is a seed of truth behind the book's excesses and rabble-rousing; many parts of the world are becoming increasingly dangerous or uninhabitable, and climate change and political changes will exacerbate both of those. People will seek shelter, new homes, better lives for themselves elsewhere, which is nothing new, but as conditions worsen worldwide the pace will quite likely quicken and more and more people will seek asylum in more prosperous nations.
So what do those prosperous-but-wary First World nations do about it?
I'm fond of Matt Christman's take on it, as his description of American alt-righters also fits the Tory mentality like a glove.
And that's what these guys are, these guys that marched in Charlottesville, these are the people who are aware of the unspoken premise of this sort of zombie neoliberalism that we're living in, which is that we're coming to a point where there's gonna be ecological catastrophe, and that it's gonna require either massive redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of the first world, or genocide.
And these are the first people who have basically said, "Well if that's the choice, then I choose genocide", and they're getting everyone else ready, intellectually and emotionally, for why that's gonna be okay when it happens, why they're not really people.
And unless enough other people stand up and say, "no, these migrants are not garbage or luggage; they are human beings," the spiral will continue. Because the Tories are one of many political forces in the world who are painting world events as a similar binary choice for the masses -- be racist, or be overrun.
posted by delfin at 8:52 AM on April 6, 2023 [17 favorites]
In it (to summarize quickly), a human tsunami of Southeast Asian migrants seeks entry into Europe on a massive fleet of journeyman ships. The migrants are depicted in dehumanizing, animalistic and violent manners, and once the lines of resistance (political and border military) fail to restrain them, they sweep over first France and soon the entire Western world via force of numbers, outbreeding the locals, taking over governments, allying with far-left and anarchist groups and violent outbursts.
There is a seed of truth behind the book's excesses and rabble-rousing; many parts of the world are becoming increasingly dangerous or uninhabitable, and climate change and political changes will exacerbate both of those. People will seek shelter, new homes, better lives for themselves elsewhere, which is nothing new, but as conditions worsen worldwide the pace will quite likely quicken and more and more people will seek asylum in more prosperous nations.
So what do those prosperous-but-wary First World nations do about it?
I'm fond of Matt Christman's take on it, as his description of American alt-righters also fits the Tory mentality like a glove.
And that's what these guys are, these guys that marched in Charlottesville, these are the people who are aware of the unspoken premise of this sort of zombie neoliberalism that we're living in, which is that we're coming to a point where there's gonna be ecological catastrophe, and that it's gonna require either massive redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of the first world, or genocide.
And these are the first people who have basically said, "Well if that's the choice, then I choose genocide", and they're getting everyone else ready, intellectually and emotionally, for why that's gonna be okay when it happens, why they're not really people.
And unless enough other people stand up and say, "no, these migrants are not garbage or luggage; they are human beings," the spiral will continue. Because the Tories are one of many political forces in the world who are painting world events as a similar binary choice for the masses -- be racist, or be overrun.
posted by delfin at 8:52 AM on April 6, 2023 [17 favorites]
Wasn’t there a report last week that said that core Tory voters were unhappy with how the refugee situation was being handled by the government? This is probably a reaction to that - as verstagen said above, this is mostly about grabbing headlines (and then secondly dehumanising and Othering migrants). The Tory party are a plague and I hope they choke on every unkind word that comes out of their mouths.
posted by The River Ivel at 9:43 AM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by The River Ivel at 9:43 AM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Has Rishi written fan-fic about boat panopticons and reform prisons for debtors and oh does his eyes just roll back to his head when he thinks of all this great free labor ... oh, and penitence, yes, the important thing.
posted by symbioid at 10:32 AM on April 6, 2023
posted by symbioid at 10:32 AM on April 6, 2023
The only way for the rich countries to prevent themselves being overrun by desperate refugees is to act to improve conditions in the countries that people will be fleeing from to such an extent that people don't need to flee from them any more.
Almost all of that involves ceasing to assist obscenely wealthy corporations in their ongoing continuation of the colonial project. Much of what remains involves ceasing to prop up repressive regimes via favourable terms of trade, notably in arms and energy.
The planet is currently well over carrying capacity for H. sapiens and has been for about a century. We've been maintaining the fiction that it isn't by relying on drawing down irreplaceable resources at an unsustainable rate, and we've been modifying our habitats in ways that degrade rather than improve their ability to sustain us, while our opinion makers encourage everybody to treat thinkers like Malthus and Ehrlich reflexively as exemplars of discredited and preferably racist crankery without ever engaging seriously with the ecological point at the core of their arguments.
But it's simply undeniable, to anybody willing not to look away from the way the biosphere has been changing over the last fifty years, that a human population bomb really is in the process of going off inside it. We need this to be widely understood instead of denied, so that enough of us will voluntarily, individually act to drop our local birth rates that our numbers actually start to decline.
And we need to keep doing that until it becomes possible to stop elbowing aside every other lifeform we share this place with, and upon whose continued existence our own relies whether or not we can identify exactly how. And the places where it's overwhelmingly most urgent that this happens are those with the highest per-capita resource consumption i.e. the rich countries on the world scale and the rich neighbourhoods more locally.
Doing this will inevitably cause resource allocation challenges as populations skew senior. The only sane way to respond to that is to encourage migration from other places, not treat it as some kind of cultural existential threat. Anybody capable of observing what an obvious fucking disaster Brexit has been for the UK must surely understand that we are a global community now and that raising up the palisades is completely counterproductive.
The is no morally justifiable argument for retaining control over ordinary people moving across borders in any way that puts refugees behind any other class of immigrant. Not one.
Treating refugees so appallingly as to remove all hope of ever getting out from under the boot heels that the wealthy and privileged are pressing on their necks is obscene, and any politician or pundit who advocates such a thing on the cynical basis that doing so will "destroy the traffickers' business model" is wholly contemptible.
As an Australian, I am ashamed that my own country is the one most responsible for pushing that wholly contemptible line in the modern era as well as doing everything it possibly can to prop up a fossil fuel industry that's directly responsible for so much displacement and human misery.
posted by flabdablet at 10:48 AM on April 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
Almost all of that involves ceasing to assist obscenely wealthy corporations in their ongoing continuation of the colonial project. Much of what remains involves ceasing to prop up repressive regimes via favourable terms of trade, notably in arms and energy.
The planet is currently well over carrying capacity for H. sapiens and has been for about a century. We've been maintaining the fiction that it isn't by relying on drawing down irreplaceable resources at an unsustainable rate, and we've been modifying our habitats in ways that degrade rather than improve their ability to sustain us, while our opinion makers encourage everybody to treat thinkers like Malthus and Ehrlich reflexively as exemplars of discredited and preferably racist crankery without ever engaging seriously with the ecological point at the core of their arguments.
But it's simply undeniable, to anybody willing not to look away from the way the biosphere has been changing over the last fifty years, that a human population bomb really is in the process of going off inside it. We need this to be widely understood instead of denied, so that enough of us will voluntarily, individually act to drop our local birth rates that our numbers actually start to decline.
And we need to keep doing that until it becomes possible to stop elbowing aside every other lifeform we share this place with, and upon whose continued existence our own relies whether or not we can identify exactly how. And the places where it's overwhelmingly most urgent that this happens are those with the highest per-capita resource consumption i.e. the rich countries on the world scale and the rich neighbourhoods more locally.
Doing this will inevitably cause resource allocation challenges as populations skew senior. The only sane way to respond to that is to encourage migration from other places, not treat it as some kind of cultural existential threat. Anybody capable of observing what an obvious fucking disaster Brexit has been for the UK must surely understand that we are a global community now and that raising up the palisades is completely counterproductive.
The is no morally justifiable argument for retaining control over ordinary people moving across borders in any way that puts refugees behind any other class of immigrant. Not one.
Treating refugees so appallingly as to remove all hope of ever getting out from under the boot heels that the wealthy and privileged are pressing on their necks is obscene, and any politician or pundit who advocates such a thing on the cynical basis that doing so will "destroy the traffickers' business model" is wholly contemptible.
As an Australian, I am ashamed that my own country is the one most responsible for pushing that wholly contemptible line in the modern era as well as doing everything it possibly can to prop up a fossil fuel industry that's directly responsible for so much displacement and human misery.
posted by flabdablet at 10:48 AM on April 6, 2023 [8 favorites]
There's no call for anyone here, let alone people with children, to take this as an opportunity to get all Malthusian.
posted by ambrosen at 1:44 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 1:44 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
And unless enough other people stand up and say, "no, these migrants are not garbage or luggage; they are human beings," the spiral will continue.
Sadly, I fear we have passed the point where enough people standing-up is going to make any change. The powers-that-be know they can do as they wish and there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it. Clearly, overwhelming public sentiment and/or outcry is just minor noise to these people now. Laws (and the interpretation and enforcement thereof) are now largely in their in their hands. And this has become largely true worldwide.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:19 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Sadly, I fear we have passed the point where enough people standing-up is going to make any change. The powers-that-be know they can do as they wish and there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it. Clearly, overwhelming public sentiment and/or outcry is just minor noise to these people now. Laws (and the interpretation and enforcement thereof) are now largely in their in their hands. And this has become largely true worldwide.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:19 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
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posted by pipeski at 6:46 AM on April 6, 2023 [15 favorites]